Who Said Timothy Leary’s Dead?

Timothy Leary’s death a year ago at age 75 was one of the more public events in an extraordinarily public life.

A key figure in the social revolution of the ‘60s, Leary basically threw open the doors of his Beverly Hills home when he was found to have inoperable prostate cancer in 1995, and the flow of traffic around him grew heavy indeed.

A regular among the crowd who turned up to pay homage to Leary was Paul Davids, an L.A. filmmaker who was there recording Leary’s final transition for “Timothy Leary’s Dead,” a film biography combining archival footage, interviews and music that opens June 6 in selected Southland theaters.

“The genesis of the film is fairly simple,” the first-time director said over breakfast at a Hollywood restaurant. “I read in the paper Timothy was dying, contacted him and told him I’d been interested in his research since his days at Harvard and asked if I could visit him regularly with a camera and document this final phase of his life.

“I told him my intention was to make a biographical documentary that would give some sense of the full arc of his life, but that the core of the film would be our interviews,” said Davids, who declined to give his age, but first encountered Leary’s work when he was attending Princeton where he earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1969.

“We then made a list of topics we wanted to deal with--his experiences in prison, people he’d known, LSD and mysticism--then we’d send him notes and questions prior to each session, and simply film our conversations. He put no constraints on me and it was made clear contractually before I began that I’d have total access. He was paid for his time, which is as it should be; he had every right to be paid for a movie about his life.”

Davids recalls that he began the project fearing that Leary’s extensive experimentation with drugs might’ve damaged his memory, and that years of tussling with the law may have left him embittered. (In 1965, Leary was sentenced to 30 years in prison for possession of a small amount of marijuana, but he avoided jail on appeals for five years, served a few months in 1970, then escaped and spent three years on the lam in Africa.)

“Happily,” Davids said, “I found him to be a gentle man with a wonderful capacity to make fun of himself. He was also astonishingly sharp and could recall obscure details of experiments he’d done decades ago. In spending time with him, I came to admire him all the more.”

Shooting from October 1995 through May 1996, Davids compiled nine hours of oral history, only 45 minutes of which wound up in his movie. A good deal of the film is devoted to interviews with Leary’s associates; among those included are colleagues from his Harvard days; Dr. Richard Alpert and Dr. Ralph Metzner; his fourth wife, Barbara Leary (who divorced him in 1994); and her son Zach.

There are, however, curious omissions. Where is Leary’s second wife, Nina Thurman? Where are his third wife, Rosemary Woodruff Leary, and his son Jack, from his marriage to his first wife, Marianne? (She committed suicide in 1955, as did his daughter, Susan, also from that marriage, who hung herself in jail in 1990.) Also missing are Leary’s comrades in arms William Burroughs, G. Gordon Liddy, Eldridge Cleaver, Hugh Hefner (who bailed Leary out of jail several times in the ‘60s), Yoko Ono and heiress Peggy Hitchcock, who provided the mansion in Millbrook, N.Y., where Leary conducted communal experiments in consciousness from 1963 to ’65.

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“Many people I wanted to include declined to be interviewed because of the controversy that still swirls around Timothy,” Davids said. “His third wife, Rosemary, for instance, suffered endless legal problems because of her marriage to Timothy, and even though that marriage ended in 1977, she was forced to live underground until 1993 when her legal problems were finally resolved. So she avoids the limelight and enjoys living quietly.”

Asked about the darker aspects of Leary’s life--his troubled relationships with his children, for instance, or the many people who experimented with hallucinogens and were unable to handle them--Davids said, “I would never attempt to defend every aspect of Timothy’s life. He was not a saint, and I never saw him deny himself any experience he wanted to have. He did, however, have a genuine optimism that’s quite admirable, and he looked at everything--including being in jail--as part of his study in life.

“Timothy took huge quantities of LSD, and as is evident in the film, it in no way dulled his brilliance. He may be the one man in millions with a nervous system able to tolerate something like that, but therein lies the risk: As is true of most drugs, there’s no way to know in advance how it will affect someone.

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“I’m sure he felt regret about anyone who couldn’t tolerate the psychological chaos they inflicted on themselves under the banner of his leadership,” Davids said. “But he believed everyone was responsible for themselves and that unless the consciousness of millions of people changed almost overnight, there was no future for the human race, and he thought psychedelics could bring about this consciousness change.”

Concluding his film with footage of Leary on his deathbed, Davids speculates that “religion didn’t seem to be significant to Timothy as he approached death, and at that point he put his faith in science.” Leary’s first response to his diagnosis was to announce that he planned to commit suicide and have it broadcast worldwide on the Internet. He then abandoned that plan and decided instead to have his head frozen in “cryonic suspension” for later thawing (he’d signed up for cryonic preservation in 1988, long before he was ill). His remaining ashes were to be shot into space.

In the weeks before his death on May 31, 1996, Leary expressed disillusionment with cryogenics but declined to say if he still planned to go through with the procedure. Davids’ movie concludes with a sequence of Leary’s body undergoing a post-mortem surgical procedure, but the director is vague when asked about its veracity. “I’ve never claimed it was real, nor have I said it was staged. Timothy and I discussed this prior to his demise, and he asked me not to reveal it.”

As to what conclusions he drew about Leary after chronicling the final chapter of his life, Davids says, “Leary’s legacy is a double-edged sword. He believed LSD could bring about a change of awareness on a global level and was worth the risks associated with it, but since the ‘60s when LSD became widely known, society has experienced a terrible proliferation of destructive drugs. I wouldn’t say Timothy has no connection to that, but at the same time, one can’t blame him for it either, and it’s fairly obvious he’s been made a scapegoat.

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“Timothy consciously set out to be the lightning rod for these issues because he had the credentials as an academician to call attention to tools he felt could be of value to society. A book was recently published called ‘The Annotated Bibliography of Timothy Leary’ that’s nothing but a list of his writings and books in various editions, and it’s 300 pages long.

“The man left an extraordinary archive of work that’s more or less unknown, largely because he put himself out there as a target for attack,” Davids said.

“Because he had the courage to express his beliefs and stand behind his words, he was a man with many enemies.”